Bloomberg has a report on the enormous cost (and enormous government intervention required) to make John "Homer without the donut" McCain's nuclear power plan a reality - McCain Nuclear Energy Revival May Cost $315 Billion.

John McCain's plan to revive the U.S. nuclear power industry with 45 new reactors may cost $315 billion, with taxpayers bearing much of the financial risk.

The Republican presidential nominee wants the plants built in time to help the U.S. meet a 29 percent increase in electricity demand by 2030. Industry estimates put their cost at $7 billion each. Barack Obama, McCain's Democratic opponent, is less specific about his plans, saying he wants to ``find ways to safely harness nuclear power.''

Global warming and the rising cost of fossil fuels have boosted chances that atomic energy will supply more U.S. electricity. Public concerns remain about reactor safety and disposing of waste that stays hazardous for millennia. Investment bankers, citing the industry's cost overruns in the 1980s, say they won't finance its long-sought ``nuclear renaissance'' without federal backing.

``Loan guarantees get reactors built, simply put,'' said Kevin Book, senior vice president and energy specialist at the Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. investment banking firm in Arlington, Virginia.

No new nuclear plants have opened in the U.S. since 1996. The 1979 scare at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union damped support for the technology.

Congress in December authorized $18.5 billion in guarantees that cover as much as 80 percent of nuclear plant construction costs -- enough to fund three typical reactors. ...

``The nuclear industry has been aggressively going after taxpayer-backed loan guarantees because nuclear technology cannot stand on its own two feet in the marketplace,'' said Allison Fisher, an energy policy analyst for the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen in Washington.

The Energy Information Administration estimated last year that adding nuclear power capacity would cost $2,143 a kilowatt before financing and inflation. ... Over the past year, the expense has more than doubled to $5,000 a kilowatt, or $7 billion for a typical reactor, utility filings and company statements show. The increase in part reflects rising prices for commodities such as steel and cement.

Renewable Energy Access has a look at the problem of nuclear denial - Nuclear Denial.

Nuclear power plants have a productive life of at least forty years. Unfortunately unlike other power plants, after forty years they cannot simply be decommissioned, razed and the site redeveloped into other uses.

Fuel rods used in nuclear power plants are actively exothermic (generating heat) for up to seventy-five years after removal from the reactor. The fuel rods require active cooling to be safely stored for those 75 years. Today, this storage and cooling is usually done in storage ponds on the site of the power plant. In other words, a power plant site, even when it has reached the end of its electricity-generating life, must remained staffed to operate the cooling ponds, with full security to prevent site intrusions and theft of the spent fuel rods.

Today, the fuel rods have to stay in the ponds on the site because there is no other place for them to go. The U.S. doesn't operate a fuel rod processing plant (like BNFL does for the United Kingdom) and has no current plans for such a vitrification facility (imbedding the active radio active waste within glass). Even then the glass-encased radioactive material must be actively cooled for 75 years, so it must be kept somewhere with human management of the site.

Who is going to pay for this? Consider the cost of staffing for 75 additional years when there is no revenue stream from electrical generation to cover this, and there is no easy way to pass the cost onto the electrical customers. This problem is only starting to be recognized since so few reactors have actually reached the end of life in the U.S. If you check the balance sheets of the major electrical utilities that own and operate nuclear power plants, you will not see any allowances for this future cost. It would be simpler to spin off the plant, let it go bankrupt and leave it to the taxpayers to deal with the mess. ...

The oldest structures built by mankind that haven't been completely erased by the forces of nature are around 5,000 years old. These are clearly no longer habitable or functional, they are "ruins." The long-term nuclear storage solution requires a facility that can remain structurally sound and sealed to air and ground water for at least 20-times more years then mankind has ever achieved. The very concept borders on nonsensical.

No human civilization has survived such a test of time (most civilizations last less than 1,000 years), no spoken or written language (to mark the site, provide maintenance instructions, etc.) has lasted more than a couple thousand years. No objects, metal tools or vessels created by man have survived corrosion and structural failure for more than a couple thousand years. Suddenly we can build fuel rod containers will magically last 100,000 years?

The operation of existing nuclear power plants, labs and facilities has been fraught with accidents, incidents and discharges throughout the 50-year history of nuclear power. Full and open disclosure of the accidents and risks taken by operators (including the U.S. government) remains dubious at best.

In a recent case, the U.S. government failed to disclose on a timely basis that a U.S. nuclear submarine may have leaked radioactive water inside a Japanese harbor. In this case, the incident came at an "awkward time" for the U.S. government because it was replacing a Japan-based U.S. oil-powered carrier with a nuclear-powered carrier, which the Japanese were already uneasy about. Disclosure would have made the negotiations much more difficult.

U.S. electrical utilities have billions tied up in each nuclear power plant. Any incident can require shut down, failure analysis and corrective action, retraining (on new equipment and procedures) and potential suspension of the license to operate. All down time means zero revenue from the plant even while most all of the operating expenses remain (including serving the billion dollar debt), so it is in the interest of every plant operator to run as many hours as possible, to have as little down time as possible and to keep "incidents" under wraps as much as possible.

Meanwhile McCain's running mate Sarah Palin has delivered some remarks about the oil market and drilling in the US that would make George Bush proud, being almost completely incomprehensible - Notable quotable.

"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first."

-- Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America," responding to a question about how oil obtained from offshore drilling can be kept in the country instead of sold on the world market, with an answer CNN's Wolf Blitzer characterized as "not exactly easy to understand"

I was rather bemused when I saw the weekend headlines announcing "McCain chooses Palin" as his running mate for his doomed campaign for the presidency this year - surely Michael Palin isn't eligible, was the first thought that ran through my head.

Unfortunately my misgivings were correct, and instead of a decent British comedian livening up the proceedings McCain has lumbered us with a mooseburger munching minion of the oil companies from Alaska. Ho hum...

Mind you, Billmon thinks Ms Palin has enough skeletons in the closet that there will be a media feeding frenzy before too long, dubbing her "shark bait" (though he had the good grace to avoid mentioning this little theory).

Meanwhile, Bob Morris reports that a permaculture bus is the latest to suffer a shakedown from the goons minding the RNC convention, and Bruce has a few chuckles with an anarchist group whose building got boarded up (to the dismay of the city council), quipping "Come and see the violence inherent in the system".

Extra points to readers who get the final Palin reference (and yes, I know the image doesn't show him)...

Billmon is back again at Daily Kos with a look at the Georgia disaster - Anatomy of A(nother) Fiasco.

In February of last year, with the newly born Democratic Congress still waiving its little arms and spitting up mucus, Dick Lugar (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Joe Biden (the committee’s nominally Democratic chairman) introduced the "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act". Like its predecessors, the bill authorized the President to immediately begin treating the Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name – with weapons sales, military advisors, etc. Senate cosponsors included Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and, naturally, John McCain (R-POW).

Also like its predecessors, the bill was whisked through both houses of Congress with about as much deliberation as a resolution praising the Future Farmers of Benton County for their fine showing at the Iowa State Fair – with no hearings, no debate, no roll call votes. President Bush signed it into law on April 9, 2007. The White House put out an official statement marking the occasion. It was one sentence long.

And so, with an absolute minimum of democratic process, the United States of America committed its full prestige and power (if not, just yet, a legally binding guarantee) to the defense of the two former Soviet republics, even though the Russians have repeatedly stated that they regard NATO membership by either country as a direct threat to their own vital security interests. As others have already noted, this is as if China had unilaterally announced a military alliance with Mexico and Cuba. Actually it’s worse: Imagine the US reaction if China announced a military alliance with Mexico, after which the president of Mexico started dropping public hints about taking New Mexico back – by whatever means necessary. (And if that comparison seems unnecessarily paranoid, consider the history of Russia in the 20th century. Even paranoids have real enemies.)

A careful search of Nexus and Google reveals that the number of stories appearing in the pages of major US newspapers and magazines, or on the wires of major American news services, taking note of this fateful decision, equals exactly one: a brief item out of UPI’s Moscow bureau, warning of the Russian reaction. The Georgian and Ukranian press, on the other hand, gave the new law saturation coverage – encouraged by their respective governments, both of which issued official statements describing their future NATO admissions as, in effect, done deals.

The Russians also reacted. Just a few days after the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act was introduced in the Senate, President Putin gave a speech in Munich that was widely reported as his harshest attack to date on America for its allegedly aggressive and hegemonic designs. The New York Times and US government officials (which is a somewhat redundant expression) both professed shock over Putin’s language – without once mentioning the congressional provocation that triggered it.

But there was just one problem: NATO admission for the Ukraine and Georgia was most emphatically not a done deal. Despite all the pressure from the Cheney Administration (which, we now know, was being played hard by pro-Georgian lobbyists, including John McCain’s current campaign manager) the French and Germans stuck to their position in the run up to last April’s NATO summit in Bucharest.

This led to another flurry of activity by the congressional expansion lobby. In January of this year, another resolution was introduced, again demanding that NATO open its doors to the Ukraine and Georgia. This time the list of cosponsors included Biden, McCain and Joe Lieberman – as well as both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It was passed by unanimous consent. And when the NATO summit nonetheless elected to pass on the Ukrainian and Georgian applications (promising, vaguely, to revisit the issue at a later date) the Demopublicans quickly came back with yet another resolution blasting the Russians for a long list of alleged violations of Georgian sovereignty and praising the NATO summit for "stat[ing] that the Republic of Georgia will become a member of NATO" – when, in fact, the summit had made no such promise. Up is down. Black is white.

Blank Checks and Bounced Ones

Looking at this dreary legislative record (which reads like something out of the old Supreme Soviet) is it any surprise Georgia’s president felt he had a virtual carte blanche from America to challenge the Russians – up to an including the use of military force in a disastrous bid to reconquer South Ossetia? Why would he think otherwise – that is, until the moment when he discovered that America had written him a check it had no real intention of honoring?

There's not much more to say - except that it’s a pretty strange world where the sworn goal of US diplomacy is to put the country in a situation where it may have to go to war with another nuclear power (or back down ignominiously) to defend the sanctity of borders drawn by Josef Stalin and Nikita Krushchev. Leaving aside the raving hypocrisy (Kosovo, Iraq) it’s an alarming sign that the national security and foreign policy elites of this country – in both parties; and not just among the lunatic neocon fringe – are totally out of control. British analyst Anatol Levin (one of the more perceptive of the realists) describes it a case of "profound infantilism":

In the United States, the infantile illusion of omnipotence, whereby it doesn’t matter how many commitments the United States has made elsewhere—in the last resort, the United States can always do what it likes.

Personally, I see it more as a case of the bureaucratic imperative run amok: The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War – the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it’s simply an afterthought – a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.

And that, ultimately, is the most depressing thing about this story: Even after the fiasco in Iraq, the bloody failure in Lebanon, the downward spiral in Afghanistan and, now, the futile posturing in Georgia, there’s absolutely no evidence the US foreign policy elite is inclined to moderate its ambition to re-organize the world along American lines. Nor is there any sign the political class (including, unfortunately, Barack Obama) is rethinking its lockstep support for that agenda. The voters, meanwhile, don’t seem to care much one way or another – as long as gas doesn’t get too expensive and the military casualties aren’t too high (or can be kept off the TV). If anything, it looks like bashing the Russians is still good politics, if only for the nostalgia value.

If you caught Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyer’s show the other night, you may have noticed that his biggest complaint was not that US foreign policy is misguided and destructive (although he clearly thinks it's both) but that it is being conducted in a democratic vacuum -- despite all the florid rhetoric about promoting democracy. We may still go through the motions of a republican form of government, Bacevich says, but the fabric has gotten pretty thin: or, in the case of our national revival of the Great Game in the Caucasus, damned near invisible.

How long before it tears completely?

The Washington Post's "PostGlobal" edition has an opinion piece touching on the same issues Billmon does, and raising the "gas OPEC" subject again, which I haven't seen for a while - Russia Positions Itself As Global Economic Player.

This split was also evident at the last NATO summit in Bucharest a few months ago. The U.S. proposed that Georgia and Ukraine become members, but Europeans partners pointedly avoided an unnecessary ruckus with Russia and came back with a polite, lukewarm "definite maybe" postponement of the matter.

Simply put, the Europeans -- united with one foreign policy and a combined GDP greater than that of the U.S. -- are not in a mood to put up another Berlin Wall or Iron Curtain made of imported suspicions against Russia. The last was European, but this one is an American argument and Europe is best served by stepping aside. This generation of Europeans consider Russians distant, unfamiliar cousins and Russia as a land of opportunity. As such, they search for commonalities and a spirit of live and let live -- entente cordiale. No one wants to make enemies or engage in an unnecessary clash born of an imaginary picture as depicted by American politicians: some sort of dark or "evil," anti-freedom and anti-democratic force.

Concurrently, Americans are taking the Georgian issue to an unnecessary level. It either a lazy fallback to old methods instead of an effort to look reality in the eye, or alternatively it is fodder for elections in U.S.A. where retail mileage can be drawn from replicating the cold war. It can serve Senator McCain and his militarist background as an heir to President Bush and it serves the current occupants of the White House to divert genuine attention from hard economic realities, massive budget deficits, private debt and the mortgage fiasco at home. And it is not a surprise to know that Mr. Randy Scheunemann (of the lobbying firm Orion Strategies in Washington) is both the chief foreign policy advisor to Senator McCain and, according to filings of the U.S. Department of Commerce, a registered lobbyist for the government of Georgia. But the recent push for freedom fries in the Caucasus turned out to be a modern day version of the failed Bay of Pigs rescue with Georgians waiting for Americans to parachute in and rescue the lot. Alas Secretary Rice went to Tbilisi to push the Georgians to accept the cease fire that was an EU initiative (mediated by France as its the present rotating president).

President Bush has chosen abrasive bully tactics in the 21st century to lecture Russia about what is good for her. Summits and discussions at a table are cast aside in some sort of muscle flexing which fabricates a new dividing line and polarizes Russia against Bush's version of the "free world". Russia has seen the deck stacked against it: The planned missile defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic is a manifest affirmation of America's reassessment of its policy towards Russia and a relapse to pre-1990 years. Talk about stripping Russia's seat from the G-8 also plays to the tune of Senator McCain's pet project of kicking Russia out of the group of industrial economies.

What is clear is that neither Russia or China are going to fall into this trap laid by President Bush. They consider the false choice of "responsible nations" and "free" nations to be contradictory for a country that has long preferred friendships with dictators outside Europe. Russia has long contemplated a payback for the breakup of Yugoslavia, subsequent support for an independent Kosovo, the missile shield system in Poland and the Czech Republic and pesky setups in Georgia and Ukraine. America's opposition to letting the International Monetary Fund help Russia during her financial problems in the early 1990s and the go-it-alone Afghanistan episode of NATO's fight against global terrorism, which excluded Russia, all confirmed Russia's suspicions.

America has been busy with old-fashioned territory grabs and the eastward crawl of NATO towards Ukraine and Georgia, aiming for relatively modest oil reserves in the Caspian region. However, Russia has been nursing a modern global strategy that leaps over borders. Russia has cut landmark deals with former and potential American clients: weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Venezuela are the first of their kind. Sales of gas via a new trans-Siberia gas pipeline to northern China and talks of a "gas OPEC" with Iran, Algeria and others is another that towers over the pseudo-democratic ideas of Georgia. Border demarcation of the North Pole (with purported reserves of more than 90 billion barrels of oil-- twelve times the amount in the Caspian region), nuclear power deals with India and Iran and direct under-sea gas pipelines to Germany, Turkey and south-eastern Europe (bypassing the Ukrainian chokehold on Russian gas lines to Europe) are other moves on the multi-dimensional chess board -- all as Russia is simply keeping cool and amusing itself with the much hyped, but failed mission of Tony Blair as the chief negotiator of the Middle East Quartet, of which Russia is a member. From the Russian perspective, all options are on the table!

One interesting theory about the Georgian debacle is that it was engineered as part of the McCain election campaign - Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy ?.

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Grist has a post on John McCain's calrion call to return to the 1950's an an era of power "too cheap to meter" (go ahead - giggle if you want - its pretty funny if you aren't a US taxpayer or electricity customer) - Uppin' Atom!.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain toured a nuclear plant in Michigan on Tuesday, using the opportunity to renew his call for the U.S. to build 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030. At the plant, McCain said that his love affair with nuclear power began when he encountered nuclear ships and submarines in the Navy. "I knew it was safe then, I know it's safe now," he said.

However, the backdrop for his nuclear-safety claim was less than ideal. The nuke plant McCain was touring has been the site of a number of nuclear accidents: one reactor had a partial meltdown in 1966 and briefly caught fire this May. Another reactor leaked in 2005, temporarily shutting down the plant. On the tour, McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of not fully supporting nuclear power, but Obama's campaign refuted the claim. An Obama spokesperson issued a statement saying that Obama "supports safe and secure nuclear energy. ... However, before an expansion of nuclear power is considered, Obama thinks key issues must be addressed, including: security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation."

Grist also reports that the cost of the Yucca Mountain waste dump continues to soar (just like the price of everything else associated with nuclear power) - Expanding Waste.

The total cost of dumping nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain repository will hit $96.2 billion, the Department of Energy estimated Tuesday. The estimate has jumped 38 percent, excluding inflation, since 2001. And it assumes no new construction of nuclear reactors; to put that in perspective, John McCain is pushing for the U.S. to build up to 45 new nuclear plants by 2030. The Energy Department ambitiously assumes that Yucca will begin accepting waste in 2020, continue through 2070, and close in 2113. It also estimates that the site could take in as much as 122,000 tons of nuclear waste, even though Congress has limited Yucca's capacity to 77,000 tons. About 64,000 tons of used reactor fuel is already chillin' at 121 temporary sites across the U.S., and more than 2,000 tons are added each year.

Greg Palast has a succinct description of the McCain energy plan - The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut.

I’m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain’s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain’s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson’s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a “safe, efficient [and] inexpensive” alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren’t –period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I’m looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion – or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say “supposed to,” it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We’re told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, “This time it will be different.” Sure. And McCain believes them.

I don’t. Maybe that’s because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant’s builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster will cash in big-time under Plan McCain.

The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can’t blame them.) KBR has built many nukes –not one within a mile of its promised cost.

But that doesn’t bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy advice from? I’m looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early. Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain’s got quite some team.) ...

McCain’s plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

The SMH reports that Obama is starting to take some shots at John McCain's energy policy (which seems to consist of first sucking up to Exxon and co to try and hang onto the oil habit for as long as possible, and second of subsidising the construction of lots of hugely expensive radioactive waste generation facilities in the hope that they will keep the other backward looking part of the energy sector afloat a little longer) - McCain is 'stooge' of oil giants: Obama.

Barack Obama has branded John McCain a stooge of profit-soaked US oil giants, as the White House rivals duelled on high gasoline prices and energy policy exactly three months from election day. Celebrating his 47th birthday, the Democrat launched a stinging counter-attack after the Republican McCain had last week cast him as a vacuous celebrity unfit to lead at a time of gathering crisis.

Unveiling a new energy plan, Obama promised a 10-year, $US150 billion ($A161.43 billion) drive to cut US "addiction" to oil from global hotspots like the Middle East and Venezuela. "Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face," Obama said in Michigan, the general election battle ground state which is home to the crippled US auto industry. "It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy."

The Illinois senator proposed a windfall tax on big oil firms to bankroll a $US1,000 ($A1,076) per family rebate to help defray soaring energy costs.

After McCain's media onslaught of last week, Obama also hit back with his own new advertisement claiming the Arizona senator was "in the pocket" of oil firms basking in record profits. "After one president in the pocket of big oil ... we can't afford another," the ad said, in a reference to President George W Bush, a former oil executive.

Obama's plan calls for an expanded use of "clean coal", solar energy, windpower, the development of new biofuels, cuts in consumption, and the creation of five million new jobs in the "green energy" sector.

Grist reports that McCain's energy policy has been formulated in some alternative reality - McCain says he trusts Big Oil over energy and economic experts.

John McCain said today that he believes what Big Oil says about the amount of oil still available in the United States' outer continental shelf, rather than estimates offered by energy experts, economists, and the government's Energy Information Administration.

A questioner in the crowd at the National Urban League conference in Orlando, Fla., asked the Republican presidential candidate about reports that offshore drilling would reap no benefit for consumers for at least a decade, if even then.

"I don't agree," McCain replied. "In fact I met with oil executives just a few days ago in California ... and the fact is that we can, using existing facilities, expand our oil production within months, according to these executives."

McCain continued, "In my view and that of oil company executives that I've talked to -- the people that actually do it, not those that comment on television, but those that actually do it -- we could, in a very short time, have a beneficial effect as we bridge the gap between our dependence on foreign oil and becoming energy independent."

"So I disagree with those experts and I've talked to the actual people that do the work, that are in the business that say within months and certainly within a very short time, we could have additional oil supply for this nation," he said. "So we ought to drill now."

Maybe the oil execs who spoke with McCain should check in with the American Petroleum Institute. The industry association states up front that opening the outer continental shelf for exploration wouldn't result in bringing new oil to market for five to ten years.

I'm quite chuffed to see that the upcoming US election has finally lured Billmon out of hiding, bringing joy to barflies everywhere, with a post at Daily Kos (the Whiskey Bar remains closed, unfortunately) looking at the long history of john McCain flip-flopping on every conceivable issue. You'll be glad to know he no longer supports flying the Confederate flag over war memorials, for example, and that he was sorry about accepting bribes (and getting caught) during the last great US banking disaster - The Great White Hope.

McCain’s primary talent has always been his ability persuade simple-minded people (i.e. his media cheerleading claque) that he is flipping or flopping as a matter of great personal principle and at great possible cost to his political career – even as he has used his various flips and flops to climb the greased pole and become the presidential nominee of his party.

I’ll leave out McCain’s early career as a professional ex-POW and passionate enemy of Vietnamese Communism (to be replaced, later, by a noble, magnanimous belief in reconciliation -- at about the same time the GOP business lobby decided that diplomatic and trade relations with Vietnam would actually be really cool.) I’ll also leave out McCain’s financially expedient (and therefore politically expedient) divorce and remarriage to a wealthy beer heiress. No one knows the human heart, etc. I wasn’t following politics in those days anyway.

But I was around, and following congressional politics rather closely (by which I mean professionally) when McCain first popped up on the political radar screen in 1986 during the so-called Keating Five scandal. In exchange for various regulatory favors, Keating, a wealthy and politically, um, generous, S&L executive, turned himself into the special friend of a bipartisan group of sleazebag Senators, with five in particular, including McCain, reaping most of the benefits. By modern standards (i.e. Jack Abramoff’s and Ted Steven’s standards) it was actually pretty tame stuff, but it was considered a big deal at the time.)

In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain "brand," because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media ("Senator admits guilt" outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.)

Now, if you go back and look, you’ll see that if Keating didn’t comp McCain as generously and vigorously as he did the other four, it was probably because McCain was a very junior senator at the time, with relatively little influence to peddle. But it wasn’t because Honest John was shy about accepting the favors that were offered him. If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won’t find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain’s fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he’d already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain’s media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them – after the world had already found out he took them. But that’s precisely what McCain did. He’s never looked back since.

The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn’t hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.

McCain pretty much disappeared from view in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s – the Dems controlled the Senate, the Cold War (his signature issue) was winding down and the Defense budget (his primary source of legislative goodies to dispense) was being cut. The big issues back then were the budget deficit and the economy, and McCain’s never been able to conceal the fact that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about either of them. ...

In 2005 and early 2006, as things DID go south in a big way for Shrub, McCain stepped up his public criticisms -- but at the same time moved behind the scenes to reassure the GOP party establishment (particularly the religious fundamentalist wing) that he could be team player. He even went down to Lynchburg and kissed the ring of Jerry Falwell (a.k.a. the "agent of intolerance.)

In public and his private media love sessions, McCain spoke out against torture (with the inevitable reference to those POW horrors he doesn’t like to talk about even while he’s talking about them.) Privately, he worked with the Cheney Administration on a compromise that would shift all torture-related program activities to the CIA and absolve everybody involved of any legal culpability. Publicly, he moved to distance himself from his GOP colleagues and their pork barrel ways (grandstanding all the way). But that didn’t stop him from campaigning for some of the worst offenders in the fall, collecting political chits he knew he would need for his second presidential run.

After the congressional elections resulted in a Democratic House and Senate, McCain must have realized that if the Democrats and the Jim Baker wing of the GOP succeeded in liquidating the Iraq fiasco forthwith, his political and foreign policy reputation would be left in shreds. So he backed the "surge" – but again, left himself a later out, if necessary, by publicly questioning whether a gang as incompetent as the Cheney Administration would be able to see it through. ...

And so it’s finally dawning, even on some members of his media "base" (ever the hapless clowns in our political theater of the absurd ) that McCain isn’t quite the straight-talking, straight-shooting military man of honor they thought he was. The White Knight has morphed into the Great White Hope – the GOP machine’s last, desperate chance to avoid the mortal humiliation of being defeated not just by a Democrat, not just by a liberal, but by a liberal Democratic black man.

Some of the suckers are even starting to suspect McCain’s been lying about them, too. Despite the cozy chats on the Straight Talk Express, the Arizona barbeque weekends, the cheerfully misogynist jokes and the teary-eyed moments when John tells one of his patented POW stories – despite, even, the donuts with sprinkles – he isn’t actually their friend at all. In fact it’s pretty obvious he despises them almost as much as he despises a system that forces him to pander both to them and to the voters.

It wasn't a one off post, as he soon followed up with First time as tragedy, second time as farce.

TomDispatch has a look at the history of "turning points" in Iraq and the sorry record of John McCain in both supporting the war and failing miserably to predict its course.

At first, we were impressed by the senator's statements in Republican primary debates about how he had actually opposed the Bush administration's conduct of the war from the start. As he told CNN's Kiran Chetry, in August of 2007, "I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three-and-a half years."

Well, having dug into those missing years a bit, here, for the record, is what we found to be Senator McCain's typical responses to some of the key questions posed above:

How would American troops be greeted?: "I believe… that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators." (March 20, 2003)

Did Saddam Hussein have a nuclear program that posed an imminent threat to the United States?: "Saddam Hussein is on a crash course to construct a nuclear weapon." (October 10, 2002)

Will a war with Iraq be long or short?: "This conflict is… going to be relatively short." (March 23, 2003)

How is the war going?: "I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical." (September 10, 2003)

How is it going (almost two months later, from the war's "greatest critic")? "I think the initial phases of [the war] were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise." (October 31, 2003)

Is this war really necessary?: "Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war." (August 30, 2004)

How is it going? (Recurring question for the war's "greatest critic"): "We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year." (December 4, 2005)

Will the President's "surge" of troops into Baghdad and surrounding areas that the senator had been calling for finally make the difference?: "We can know fairly well [whether the surge is working] in a few months." (February 4, 2007)

In April 2007, accompanied by several members of Congress, Senator McCain made a surprise visit to Baghdad to assess the surge, had a "stroll" through a market in the Iraqi capital, and then held a news conference where he discussed what he found: "Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I've been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today. The American people are not getting the full picture of what's happening here today."

The next evening, NBC's Nightly News provided further details on that "stroll." The Senator and Congressmen were accompanied by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." (In addition, the network said, still photographs provided by the military revealed that McCain and his colleagues had been wearing body armor during their entire stroll.)

Reality check: Five months later, on September 12, 2007, McCain again observed that "the next six months are going to be critical."

Six months later, McCain claimed that the U.S. had finally reached a genuine turning point in Iraq and that his faith in the surge was (once again) vindicated. On March 17, 2008, he reported: "We are succeeding. And we can succeed and American casualties overall are way down. That is in direct contradiction to predictions made by the Democrats and particularly Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people appreciate it."

Well, we at the Institute of Expertology appreciate it, too, and we are, of course, pleased to record the Senator's ever-renewable faith in this latest turning point. As scrupulous scholars, however, we do feel compelled to add that the Senator is not the first to detect such a turning point. Indeed on July 7, 2003, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith said: "This month will be a political turning point for Iraq."

On November 6, 2003, President Bush observed: "We've reached another great turning point..." On June 16, 2004, President Bush claimed: "A turning point will come two weeks from today."

That same day the Montreal Gazette headlined an editorial by neoconservative columnist Max Boot: "Despite the Negative Reaction by Much of the Media, U.S. Marines Did a Good Job in Fallujah, a Battle That Might Prove a Turning Point." On February 2, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: "On January 30th in Iraq, the world witnessed an important moment in the global struggle against tyranny, a moment that historians might one day call a major turning point." On March 7, 2005 William Kristol wrote: "[T]he Iraqi election of January 30, 2005... will turn out to have been a genuine turning point."

On December 18, as that year ended, Vice President Cheney, while conceding that "the level of violence has continued," assured ABC News: "I do believe that when we look back on this period of time, 2005 will have been the turning point..."

The Institute continued to record turning points in remarkable numbers in 2006, and 2007, but perhaps in 2008 the surge will, indeed, turn out to be the turning point to end all turning points. After all, Senator McCain has staked his campaign on it.

John McCain is advocating alternative energy to solve America's energy security problems - unfortunately by "alternative" he means coal and nuclear. I guess they hadn't invented solar or wind power during his mid-life years - though someone is shamelessly using wind turbines in some of his campaign material.

The Huffington Post meanwhile, has a look at the fantasy world the McCain campaign is trying to get voters to inhabit for a little while.

John McCain unveiled his new campaign strategy today: invite the American people to take a magic carpet ride with him to the land of Eternal Sunshine.

In a speech this morning in Ohio -- backed up by a companion TV ad -- McCain hopped into an imaginary time machine and took us all to the year 2013, offering a sneak peek of what the world will look like at the end of his first term as President.

And what a wonderful world it will be: "The Iraq War has been won": "Iraq is a functioning democracy"; "al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated"; Osama bin Laden has been captured or killed; there's been no major terrorist attack in the U.S.; Iran and North Korea have renounced nuclear weapons; "the size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased and are now better equipped"; there's been "a substantial increase" in veterans' benefits; the genocide in Darfur has been stopped; "the United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth, and Americans again have confidence in their economic future"; "the world food crisis has ended"; "test scores and graduation rates are rising everywhere in the country"; "health care has become more accessible"; Medicare and Social Security have been fixed "without reducing benefits" or "increasing taxes and raising premiums"; America is "well on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil"; "our southern border is now secure" and "illegal immigration has been finally brought under control." And, oh yeah, there are a lot fewer fat kids trudging their way through PE class.

Sounds pretty great, doesn't it?

There's only one problem: it's pure, unadulterated fantasy. The political equivalent of the trippy tour the Beatles gave us in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds -- only instead of rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies, we have "professional and competent" Iraq Security Forces and an Iraqi government "capable of imposing its authority in every province" and "defending the integrity of its borders."

Despite starting his speech by saying how important it is for candidates to lay out "what they plan to achieve not with vague language but with clarity," McCain then proceeded to spin his cotton candy daydream with nary a hint of how his lofty and admirable goals will be accomplished. He's taking us on a trip to Fantasyland, but at no point does he show us how we're going to get there.

Sure, he tossed out a few generalized, pie-in-the-sky allusions to "reforms of the [health] insurance market" and "reforms to the way we acquire weapons programs" and a handful of specifics, including "a reduction in the corporate tax rate" and the building of "20 new nuclear reactors." But when it came to Iraq, he didn't offer even the vaguest clue about how -- after five long years of failure -- victory, democracy, the defeat of al Qaeda, the prevention of civil war, the disbanding of militias, and the sudden competence of the Iraqi military will magically be achieved. Rather, one morning four and a half years from now, we're going to wake up and pigs will be flying, and all will be right with the world.

I get the thinking behind the McCain camp's strategy. With 82 percent of the public unhappy with the direction of the county, and with 68 percent unhappy with the war, and 75 percent anxious about the economy (which McCain admits he doesn't understand all that well), there is no way McCain or his fellow Republicans can run on reality or their record over the last seven-plus years, so they have to run on fantasy.

But building castles in the sky -- and painting rosy, reality-free scenarios -- runs counter to McCain's brand as a straight talker™ who tells it like it is, even when that means admitting that ending the war or fixing the economy or passing needed reforms won't be easy.

Meanwhile Keith Olbermann has a great dissertation on the evils of the Bush regime, noting that they may one day face international war crimes trials for their destruction of Iraq - check out the videos.

Hopefully Bush's disgraceful performance in the middle east this week makes people think about the attraction of another 4 years of Republican fear and war mongering if they are foolish enough to vote for McCain (whether or not Obama or Hillary will pull out is pretty questionable of course, but you can be sure McCain won't).



Watch the videos - there are more gem quotes in here than I have seen in a long time.

Moving on, the Huffington Post has a review of John Cusack's new movie "War, Inc"

War, Inc. is a radically different kind of movie. In fact, it really defies genre. It is sort of like this generation's Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and The Wizard of Oz mixed together with the un-embedded reporting of Naomi Klein, spiced up with a dash of South Park. It is a powerful, visionary response to the cheerleading culture of the corporate media and a pliant Hollywood afraid of its own shadow.

On the surface, War, Inc. appears to be a spoof of the corporatization of the occupation of Iraq. Cusack plays a hit man, named Hauser, deployed to Turaqistan with the mission of killing a Middle Eastern oil baron (named Omar Sharif). Hauser's employer is a secretive for-profit military corporation run by the former US vice president, played by Dan Aykroyd. We first meet Aykroyd's character as he sits, pants down, on a toilet seat during a closed-circuit satellite videoconference call to give Hauser his mission. Hauser arrives in the Turaqi capital and heads for the "Emerald City" (read: the Green Zone), where his cover is director of a trade show for the military corporation, Tamerlane, which is basically running the Turaqi occupation. Hauser soon falls for a progressive journalist, played by Marisa Tomei, who is in Turaqistan to investigate Tamerlane, and what follows is an insane ride through Cusack's interpretation of the radical corporatization of war.

Singer Hilary Duff gives a surprisingly fun performance as a pop star, Yonica Babyyeah, who performs a song in the war zone with the lyrics, "You say you want to invade me, baby/Enslave me, baby." As Duff delivers the song, she caresses a phallic gas nozzle decorated with diamonds while singing, "I want to blow you....up." Obviously Cusack and his co-writers, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser (REDS/Bulworth), sought to tap into the extreme nature of the corporatized war and take it to another level, but anyone who thinks the premise behind War Inc. is "over-the-top" has not been paying attention to real life.

Cusack, Leyner and Pikser are not predicting the future, they are forcefully -- and with dark humor and wit -- branding the present for what it is: the Wal-Mart-ization of life (and death) represented in the new US model for waging war. With 630 corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton on the US government payroll in Iraq getting 40% of the more than $2 billion Washington spends every week on the occupation, Cusack's "futuristic" film is not far from the way things really are. A powerful, for-profit war corporation, run by the former US vice president "owning" the war zone; tanks with NASCAR-like sponsor logos speeding around the streets firing at will; "implanted journalists" watching the war in IMAX theaters in the heavily-fortified "Emerald City" to get "full spectrum sensory reality" while eating popcorn; a secretive "viceroy" running the show from behind a digital curtain are all part of Cusack's battlefield in the fictitious Turaqistan. But how far are they from the realities of the radically privatized corporate war machine Washington has unleashed on the world?

War Inc. is already an underground cult classic and will likely remain so for years to come. The film is not without its shortcomings -- at times it is confusing and drags -- but its faults are significantly overshadowed by its many strengths. It also accomplishes the difficult feat of being very entertaining and funny, while delivering a powerful punch of truth. War, Inc. is a movie that deserves a much wider viewing than the barons of the film industry are likely to give it. But by filling the theaters in the opening days, people can send a powerful message that there is -- and must be -- a market for films of conscience.

This is off-topic - but very funny- Things Younger Than John McCain. After reading through a few pages I'm starting to think that *everything* is younger than this guy.

Some examples :

* Alaska
* Plutonium
* Barack Obama's Parents
* McDonalds
* Polio vaccine

With John McCain looking the likely Republican nominee after his Super Tuesday wins and Mitt "nice hair" Romney's exit from the race, the SMH was suggesting that a Republican win is still on the cards, in spite of the abject failure of the Bush administration.

WITH George Bush as the most unpopular president since the invention of the opinion poll, it may seem perverse. But America is now at least as likely to vote another Republican into the White House as it is to vote for a Democrat. That's right. In spite of everything that has gone so wrong - the misadventure in Iraq, the looming downturn in the economy, sharpening inequality, the dreadful state of American health care - the Republicans are at least even money to win. Again.

Now McCain isn't as loathsome as most of the other Republican candidates were, but unfortunately he is still a crazed warmonger apparently itching to attack Iran and claiming he is content to occupy Iraq for another 100 years (which based on the rate of attrition over the past 5 years would leave the country completely depopulated), which had Ron Paul noting this had him out of step with most Americans and that his comments recklessly put Americans at risk.

Paleo-con Pat Buchanan reckons that McCain "Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi", while Dave Roberts is wondering if the media is going to give him a free pass on his lukewarm attitude towards action on global warming.

Back to the Iraq topic (which seemed to be of interest to a few readers this week - the best summary of my evolving view of Iraq is probably "Iraq, Oil, Law and Order" rather than the "Honest John" post which has been so popular lately), The Australian reports that Iraqi oil production is now at its highest level since the war began.

OIL production in Iraq is at its highest level since the US-led invasion of 2003, reaching 2.4 million barrels a day, thanks largely to improved security measures in the north.

The country’s Oil Ministry will shortly invite international oil companies to bid for contracts to help Iraq to boost output at its investment-starved “super-giant” oilfields. Production is expected to pass the prewar level of 2.6 million barrels by the end of the year, and Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi Oil Minister, told The Times that he expected production to reach six million barrels a day within four years. ...

A new report from the US Inspector-General says that the Iraqi Government will receive a $US15 billion windfall to help its reconstruction efforts thanks to soaring oil prices.

Mr al-Shahristani said that the Government would not wait for Iraq’s fractious parliament to approve long-delayed legislation providing a legal framework for foreign investment in the oil industry. The Government is to invite foreign companies to help Iraq to develop new fields.

Jeroen van de Veer, the chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell, confirmed yesterday that it was “very interested” in new opportunities in Iraq, which sits on the world’s third largest proven oil reserves. “We have made various proposals to the Government,” he said.

Now obviously there is a lot more oil yet to pump from Iraq - which by my reckoning, has likely the largest oil reserves in the world rather than third largest.

The fact that the Iraqi administration seems to have given up on passing the hugely unpopular oil law (which hands over Iraq's "undiscovered" oil - or perhaps not so undiscovered, to those will a little knowledge of Iraqi history - to international oil companies) is interesting - apparently the 'democracy" thing is only going to be taken so far after all, which doesn't augur well for future stability in the country.

There is more spin at the FT, who note Shahristani's speech was at Chatham House in London, and trying to lay the blame on the Kurds.

The Iraqi government is inviting major oil multinationals to participate for the first time in the development of the oil industry, without waiting for the passage of crucial but controversial hydrocarbons legislation.

In a sign that the oil law the US has been pressing for is unlikely to be agreed by parliament any time soon, Hussain Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, said in an interview with the Financial Times that Iraq was now determined to push ahead with plans to raise production from a current 2.5m barrels per day to 6m bpd in five years.
Kirkuk crude from the north.

Speaking on the sidelines of a conference at Chatham House in London, he said major companies were registering to pre-qualify for oil development licences before the February 18 deadline. The process, he said, should lead next year to the award of the first contracts to develop oil fields across the country.

Meanwhile AFP reports that Baghdad is drowning in sewage. Apparently they haven't been told what a success "the surge" has been and how reconstruction is going swimmingly...

Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said on Sunday in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth," said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

Sheikhly told a news conference in the capital that water pipes, where they exist, are so old that it is not possible to pump water at a sufficient rate to meet demands -- leaving many neighbourhoods parched. A sharp deficit of 3,000 megawatts of electricity adds to the woes of residents, who are forced to rely on neighbourhood generators to light up their lives and heat their homes. "Sewerage, water and electricity are our three main problems," said Sheikhly, adding that many of these problems date back to the Saddam Hussein regime when not enough attention was paid to basic infrastructure.

Insurgency, sectarian violence and vandalism since the US-led invasion in March 2003 had further ravaged services in the capital, he added.

Alternet reports that while McCain might want to stay in Iraq for another 3 or 4 generations, some Americans are trying to bring National Guard troops home right now.

Five years ago, George Bush called the Guard into national service pursuant to the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq. The AUMF, passed by Congress in its rush to war, established a limited mission: First, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power; second, enforcement of preceding United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding the elimination of alleged Iraqi WMDs and ballistic missiles. The Vermont bill recognizes that those two mission objectives are complete and that the national service of the Vermont Guard is over; the bill recalls the Guard to state control.

And Vermont is not alone. State legislators in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island plan to sponsor similar legislation. And legislators in several other states, including Maryland, Maine and Wisconsin, have openly declared that they are examining the issue and considering following suit.

This latest chapter in Democracy v. Empire illustrates one of the most significant and perhaps most underreported aspects of the tragedy which is the occupation of Iraq: The wisdom of the American people. For a public that has all but given up hope for congressional action to end the war, this new state-based legal approach takes advantage of a surge of another kind ...

In the runup to the ill-fated U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, nearly 200 municipalities passed symbolic resolutions stating all of the reasons that the United States should not invade: The war would be too costly; it was the wrong priority for federal funds that could be better spent in our own crumbling communities; there was no evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq; there was insufficient evidence of WMDs; U.N. weapons inspectors needed time to finish doing their job; hope lay with multilateralism, not unilateralism; and above all, the potential was great for devastating and unnecessary loss of life on all sides.

Unfortunately, the wisdom from Main Street U.S.A. proved vastly better than the "intelligence" propagated by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In these last five years of occupation, we have seen estimates of the war cost rise to between $500 billion and $3.5 trillion, depending on the source. Four thousand U.S. soldiers and over half a million innocent Iraqi civilians -- men, women and children -- have lost their lives; hundreds of thousands of others have been seriously wounded. Iraq no longer exists as an independent or intact nation.

In the face of the horrific war toll, world and domestic public opinion have turned sharply against both the foolish presidency and the cowardly Congress. Over 300 cities, towns, counties and states have expressed opposition to continuing the war. Fully half of the U.S. population either affirmatively voted in popular referenda for withdrawal from Iraq, or are represented by elected city councils, town boards or state legislatures that voted for withdrawal. The wisdom of the American people continues unabated.

Now, with the Vermont legislation, the public wisdom may become a reality. Those same legislators who passed anti-war resolutions can now cast votes recalling the Guard from Iraq. Vermont has, once again, led the way.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stones has a disgruntled look at "The Chicken Doves" of the Democratic party - "Elected to end the war, Democrats have surrendered to Bush on Iraq and betrayed the peace movement for their own political ends".

Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.

Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party's energies on topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn't fit Iraq into his busy schedule. "We have the presidential election," Reid said recently. "Our time is really squeezed."

There was much public shedding of tears among the Democratic leadership, as Reid, Pelosi and other congressional heavyweights expressed deep sadness that their valiant charge up the hill of change had been thwarted by circumstances beyond their control — that, as much as they would love to continue trying to end the catastrophic Iraq deal, they would now have to wait until, oh, 2009 to try again. "We'll have a new president," said Pelosi. "And I do think at that time we'll take a fresh look at it."

Pelosi seemed especially broken up about having to surrender on Iraq, sounding like an NFL coach in a postgame presser, trying with a straight face to explain why he punted on first-and-goal. "We just didn't have any plays we liked down there," said the coach of the 0-15 Dems. "Sometimes you just have to play the field-position game...."

In reality, though, Pelosi and the Democrats were actually engaged in some serious point-shaving. Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over the anti-war movement, packing the nation's leading group with party consultants more interested in attacking the GOP than ending the war. "Our focus is on the Republicans," one Democratic apparatchik in charge of the anti-war coalition declared. "How can we juice up attacks on them?"

The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what's to come if they win the White House. And if we don't pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there's still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame. ...

While almost all the Iraq related news is bleak, TreeHugger has managed to find one positive glimmer, reporting on an "Intrepid Group Sowing Seeds of Environmental Awareness Among Iraqi Youth".

With all of the chaos going on in Iraq it’s a surprise to learn that somehow there is someone thinking about the education of Iraqi children when it comes to environmental issues. And while it’s just a start, the truth is that the longest journey begins with a single step.

Which sounds like precisely the reasoning behind the “Children’s Bird Guide of Iraq” a new book being released by BirdLife International to introduce Iraq’s children to their local birds using their own language.

In total, the book provides enough information to enable kids to properly identify more than 35 species of birds in Iraq that can be commonly seen in wetlands, deserts and arid lands, mountainous areas, towns and gardens.

As Mike Rands, the CEO of BirdLife points out, “This is a major step in developing the future of nature conservation in Iraq. Once you know and can identify the biodiversity you coexist with, you are far more likely to care about its fate.”

And while it’s probably going to be a long road for a lot of things in Iraq, I think this tiny positive step in the right direction is definitely worth celebrating.